Whether you’re interested in exit planning or discovering opportunities for growing your profits, planning is an essential part of any business. As the adage goes, failing to plan is planning to fail.
When you think about tax planning or public accounting services, business advisory doesn’t immediately come to mind. The role a CPA plays in your business can be that of a historian, producing financial statements and tax returns that ensure you are in compliance and documenting your business history. Here at Haskell & White, we’re a little different. We believe in helping our clients do more.
We like to take things a step further by helping you identify ways to increase revenue, maximize profits, and achieve long-term business goals. Understanding your business and the financials puts us in an excellent position to advise you on taking your business to the next level, protecting what you’ve built, or maximizing your place in the market. That’s why we utilize the GPS Business Diagnostic to focus on what matters. GPS stands for Growth & Profit Solutions, and that’s exactly what this tool provides.
What’s Working and What Isn’t?
When you’re in the thick of operations, it’s difficult to see the forest for the trees. If you aren’t hitting your profit goals, it’s likely that some underlying problems are stalling your success. But how do you differentiate issues from opportunities? How can you tell what’s working and what isn’t?
Our GPS Business Diagnostic is a check-up for your business. Similar to the GPS on your phone or in your car, this tool works like a roadmap for success.
It’s like getting a bird’s eye view of what’s going on inside of your organization. By filling out a short, five-minute questionnaire, you can quickly identify your top three areas of high performance and your top three areas needing improvement. Once these areas are identified, we assist in building strategic plans to capitalize on your strengths and reduce the effects of any weaknesses.
This analysis goes beyond routine public accounting services and instead looks at ten holistic success factors, which include:
- People
- Systems
- Implementation
- Strategy
- Profit
- Leadership
- Innovation
- Marketing
- Sales
- Technology
Once completed, you instantly get a visual report, including line bar presentations of all ten areas, color-coded to represent how you’re performing in them. Green bars represent your strengths, while red bars represent your weaknesses. Yellow bars are the areas in between.
How Public Accounting Services Can Support Growth and Profit
From Gallup’s CliftonStrengths specialists to Tim Ferris’s 4-hour workweek, many experts agree that the real key to success lies in finding your strengths and capitalizing on them. For your weaker areas, it’s about eliminating the time you spend on them by automating processes or finding simple solutions for improvement.
As a public accounting firm, sometimes we speak with company leaders who want to increase the top line revenue number to improve their profit percentage, only to realize after using our GPS tool that concentrating on efficiency and removing “waste” in the business will be a better approach. We discover that they’re spending capital inefficiently, making it appear that they aren’t hitting their bottom line. In reality, it’s an operations issue versus a sales issue. Finding opportunities to eliminate excess spending and maximize cost efficiencies can make a huge difference for these companies.
Other times, we’ll find that companies aren’t pricing their products effectively. Their margins are too small and they’re leaving money on the table. In other instances, we find that there’s a talent issue. People are in the wrong positions or critical positions are missing. For example, a company may be poised for growth, but without a key operations leader in place, incoming demand may not be met.
The ten areas listed above represent the ten barriers to business success. If you’re failing in any of these facets, you’re limiting your potential for growth.
Ready to Try the GPS Business Diagnostic?
Whether you’re experiencing growing pains, failing to hit your profit goals, or you want to get a sense of where your business stands, give this diagnostic a try. It’s completely free, and it only takes about five minutes to complete. It’s simple, straightforward, and perfect for a middle-market company.
A quick tip: we recommend having multiple members of your management team take the assessment for the most evident results. Getting perspectives from different stakeholders allows you to see which strengths and weaknesses overlap. Our favorite feature of this resource is combining multiple reports to see if the leaders of an organization are in sync.
If you’re looking for more insight after seeing your results, we offer a one-hour consultation to review the report.